The graphic arts industry is concerned with the function of feeding or moving printed sheets or signatures from a stack or collection thereof and into a gathering apparatus so that the sheets can be collated. The present day popular way of accomplishing that function is to position a bundle of the sheets in a location adjacent a gatherer, and then to strip the sheets from the bundle in a shingled form and direct that shingled stream of sheets into the hopper of a feeder of those sheets. That prior art arrangement is shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,522,943 and 3,982,749, by way of general examples. In that instance, the sheets must be taken from the initial bundle and positioned into a stream relationship, and the sheets are then again stacked in the desired quantity in the feeder hopper which requires that the sheets be positioned therein in only certain quantities, and thus the entire initial bundle cannot be placed into the hopper, but the stream feed is resorted to.
The present invention provides for apparatus and method for properly loading the hopper, but to do so without the requirement of placing the sheets into an initial stream prior to re-collecting them into a stack in the hopper. As such, the present invention improves upon the prior art in that it does not require that the sheets be placed into a stream of shingled sheets, but, instead, the sheets can be moved from the initial bundle and directly into the hopper while the sheets remain basically in their side-by-side relationship.
The advantage of the present invention is particularly appreciated when dealing with certain stock of sheet which does not shingle well, or when dealing with a great number of pages in each signature in the original stack, and, again, the signatures then do not accurately and easily enter into a shingled stream of signatures.
The present invention improves upon the prior art in providing for an improved method and apparatus for feeding sheets into a gatherer, such as the hopper of the gatherer, and to do so by moving the sheets directly from the initial bundle and into the hopper, without intervening apparatus or requirements for shingling or the like. In this improvement, sheets are therefore placed within the control of a conveyer which receives the initial stack of sheets and which continuously moves into a downwardly directed orientation to place the sheets into a reclining orientation in the hopper of the gatherer, all in an accurate and desirable manner of both alignment and quantity required by the gatherer. Further, in accomplishing this objective, the apparatus of the present invention is of a simplified construction, compared to the requirements of the prior art, but yet the present inventive apparatus is reliable and sturdy and is automatically controlled in feeding the sheets into the hopper in accordance with the automatic detection of the requirements of the hopper. Still further, the present apparatus and method provides for accommodating sheets of different widths and different types of stock and stacking requirements, and thus the present invention is versatile and highly desirable for the function of loading sheets into the hopper of a gatherer .